NEW! By Barry Rubin

“There have been many hundreds of books for and against Israel but no volume presenting the essential information about its domestic politics, its society, as well as its cultural life and its economy. This gap has now been filled.”—Walter Laqueur, author of A History of Zionism

"[An] essential resource for readers interested in learning the truth about the Zionist project in the 20th and 21st centuries."—Sol Stern, Commentary

“Offering in-depth perspectives with encyclopedic breadth on the makeup of the Jewish state, focusing only briefly on Israel's struggle for self-preservation. The section "History" provides a masterful summary of Israel's past from its socialist beginnings before independence to the modern struggles with the Iranian regime. . . .”—Publishers Weekly

“A well-written portrait of a vibrant nation at the center of turmoil in the region.”—Jay Freeman, Booklist

"It is indeed just a starting point, but Israel: An Introduction, if disseminated among our universities to the extent it deserves, will at least allow students of the Middle East and of Jewish history to start off on the right foot. A glimpse into the real Israel may do more for the future of U.S.-Israeli relations than any amount of rhetoric ever could."—Daniel Perez, Jewish Voice New York

Written by a leading historian of the Middle East, Israel is organized around six major themes: land and people, history, society, politics, economics, and culture. The only available volume to offer such a complete account, this book is written for general readers and students who may have little background knowledge of this nation or its rich culture.

About Me

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. See the GLORIA/MERIA site at www.gloria-center.org.

Recent Rubin Reports

Monday, April 30, 2012

What might well be the most significant election in Middle East history is about to happen yet the situation and its implications are simply not understood abroad. On May 23-24, with a probable run-off on Jun 16-17, the most important country in the Arabic-speaking world is almost certainly going to choose a revolutionary transformation that will ensure continuous earthquakes of war, suffering, and instability for decades to come.

Of the dozen candidates only three are important and the question is which of them will end up in the run-off.

--Muhammad Mursi, head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.

--Abdel Moneim Aboul Fatouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader who resigned to run for president.

--Amr Musa, a radical nationalist who combines being an anti-American, anti-Israel demagogue with some real experience in government and some sense of realism and restraint. He has proclaimed the Egypt-Israel peace treaty to be dead. If you don't have a peace treaty that means you are in a state of [three letter word being with "w" and ending with "r."

There are also, among the more serious of the also-rans, a leftist, an old regime supporter, three liberals, and another Islamist.

The mainstream Western view of the election is bizarre and very damaging. In this fantasy, Aboul Fatouh is portrayed as the liberal candidate. If he wins, everything will be just fine and dandy. You can go back to sleep.

What evidence is adduced for this picture? Basically, none. The idea is that his moderation was proven because he defied the Brotherhood to run for the office. Yet the reality is the exact opposite. The Brotherhood refused to run a candidate at a time when it was following a cautious strategy, wanting to show that it wasn’t seeking total power and could co-habit—at least for five years—with a non-Islamist president.

By declaring his candidacy, Aboul Fatouh was in fact taking a more radical approach. Later, when the Brotherhood felt more confident after winning almost half the parliamentary seats it became more aggressive.

Most important of all, Aboul Fatouh is the candidate endorsed by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based anti-American, antisemitic hardliner. Qaradawi would never endorse anyone who was actually “moderate” much less “liberal.”

There are three factors likely to determine the outcome of the first round:

--What proportion of Muslim Brotherhood (parliamentary) voters will support Mursi? Perhaps a quarter or more of the Brotherhood voters backed the group not so much because they wanted an Islamic state but because they thought the Brotherhood was more honest, would govern better, and so on. Will they stick with the Brotherhood for the presidency or will they go for Aboul Fatouh or even Musa?

--Having no candidate of their own who will the Salafi support? Since their goal is to provide a more radical alternative to the Brotherhood, some—but not all—of the leaders will probably go for Aboul Fatouh. But what about their voters who have almost no organizational loyalty—in contrast to the Brotherhood voters—and will presumably support the man they see as the one with the most radical Islamist vision. Few of these people will back Musa.

---Who will support Musa? There is no nationalist bloc in Egypt today. Might Musa emerge as the secularist candidate uniting those voters (only 25 percent we should remember) who don’t want Islamism? No. The Christians and liberals don’t look at Musa as their man and will probably split their vote among three competing liberal candidates who don’t have a chance.

The result may well be an Islamist versus Islamist run-off. In any event, it is likely that by the end of the year Egypt will have an Islamist president, parliament, and Constitution. Laws will be drastically altered, women’s rights will disappear, and Hamas would be backed up if it attacked Israel.

Once in power, an Islamist government would eventually appoint similar people to run the military, the religious establishment, the schools, and the courts. Those who don’t like it will head for the West in droves.

The alliance with America would be over, whatever cosmetic pretense of friendship remained and despite how much money the Obama Administration pumped in. And the whole region will be sent a signal that this is the era of revolutionary Islamism and jihad at a time when America is weak or even—as many moderate Arabs believe—siding with the Islamists.

In the West, no one in power is prepared for this revolution, an upheaval that will rival or exceed the 1979 one in Iran for its impact.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Let me sum up the situation regarding U.S. policy toward revolutionary Islamism like this. A man threatens, "Surrender or I'll kill you!" The victim surrenders and then boasts of how he put an end to violence by offering an alternative, peaceful "channel of expression"!

By Barry Rubin

Michael Hirsh has responded to my critique of his article. Amazingly, yet in the context of our era, he did not engage with a single —not a single—idea that I presented. It is also rather clear that Hirsh knows nothing about the Middle East and so is merely arguing based on unsuitable analogies, a lack of knowledge about history, and a blind faith in "experts" who don't seem to be very expert at all. About their political philosophy I couldn't care less.

First, Hirsh relies on a partisan political characterization This is how things work now. You cast the person in a political category your readers will detest, signaling your readers to ignore the substance of what that person says. Thus, Hirsh begins:

“On the Web, other conservatives joined in: Barry Rubin, a zealously pro-Israel writer, addressing what he called the “great controversy” that “erupted” over my article, acknowledged that Obama had discarded the GWOT.”

Incidentally, I'm not a conservative but a foreign policy analyst of the Realist school who has dealt professionally with the Middle East for 35 years almost to the day (happy anniversary!). I also guess he didn't want to write a zealously pro-American writer, too. Indeed, I'm the one here who represents a liberal position here, not those who are indifferent to a right-wing repressive, dictatorial, and clerical regime gaining power.

So that makes me one of those silly, strange people who think that when your worst enemies take power in key countries, through violent revolution or election, this is not a cause for celebration. I discuss the proper alternative policy here which is as "conservative" as Franklin Roosevelt's strategy in World War Two and Harry Truman's strategy for the Cold War.

I’m also amused that he said I “acknowledged” his claim when what I actually proved that I'd scooped it by three years. More important, however, he ignored my point that this is not a political issue:

“Still, why should someone have to be `right wing’ to oppose a group that in Marxist terminology would be called `clerical-fascist?’ Why should those on the `left wing’ (or mainstream, which often seems to amount to the same thing nowadays) back a group that wants to suppress women, kill homosexuals, wipe out Jews, crush basic freedoms taken for granted in the West, and holds an ideology that resembles fascism more than any other Western ideology? Since when does the `left wing’ love those who could be called

reactionary religious fanatics?”

There is absolutely nothing “conservative” in my article nor anything that necessarily relates to Israel. But Hirsh maintains the myth that good liberals should want to engage and foster the Brotherhood and other such groups while conservatives don’t. To understand how upside-down Hirsh's view is, think of these analogies: right-wingers explaining the Communists are moderate; left-wingers insisting the Nazis are ok.

Incidentally, that is why those on the Western left must always insist that their opponent can never be liberal: because they must conceal the anti-liberal nature of their own views.

He continues:

“But then Rubin went on to lament how misguided this approach still was. `In this context, then, all other revolutionary Islamist groups—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, and so on—are not enemies. They can be won over or at least neutralized as threats to U.S. interests,’ he wrote. This is dangerously naïve, Rubin concluded. The truth, he said, is that America’s “interests and allies are increasingly menaced by a growing threat [revolutionary Islamism] whose existence, meaning, and scope current U.S. policy does not even recognize yet, much less counter effectively.”

It is nice he quoted my argument. But he did not respond to it! Hirsh goes on:

“Yet Rubin’s contention no longer appears to stand up well to the developing realities in the Arab world. Not only are bin Laden and most of his senior lieutenants (except for Ayman al Zawahiri) dead; the so-called Arab Spring has opened up new channels of expression, supplying for the first time in decades an alternative to violent jihad.”

But I’ve been describing this reality for a long time. Hirsh twists my words that were mostly written only hours before his response. My contention is designed as a response to “developing realities” not as a failed prediction that they wouldn’t happen. He simply repeats the contention that I have just critique in detail.

The fact that this supplies an alternative to “violent jihad” is not so marvelous for two reasons.

First, a violent jihad is a form of revolutionary struggle. If the revolution wins you don’t need to continue the struggle on that front. For example, in the past there was violent revolutionary Communist activity in Latin America. If Latin American countries were to become fundamentally transformed and taken over who needs guerrillas in the mountains?

Second, as I pointed out:

“At least today it should be clear that a group capable of taking over a country with millions of people and running it for decades (the Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hizballah) is a greater threat than a group that can stage a few terror attacks each year. But it still isn't even on the radar of the Western mainstream debate or the Obama Administration's strategy.”

Yet Hirsh assumes that the question of power doesn’t matter, what’s bad is violent jihad but if the jihad triumphs that’s okay.

Since the 1990s, Hizballah has defined itself along a number of parallel lines, each of which prior to 2011 appeared to support the other. The movement was simultaneously a sectarian representative of the Lebanese Shi’a, a regional ally of Iran and Syria, a defender of the Lebanese against the supposed aggressive intentions of Israel, and a leader of a more generically defined Arab and Muslim “resistance” against Israel and the West. As a result of the events of 2011, most important the … [Read more...]

On October 23, 2011, Tunisia held the first free and democratic elections in the country’s history. Tunisian voters were called upon to elect 217 members of the National Constituent Assembly (NCA), whose task was to appoint an interim government and to draft a new constitution within one year, and to prepare the country for general elections. The Islamist party Ennahda was then declared the winner of the election, obtaining 89 seats. The main problem with these elections, however, was the … [Read more...]

This article is a short analysis of how Turkey changed under AKP rule so that the regime no longer wished to have an alignment with Israel but, on the contrary, needed to treat Israel as an enemy. In order to understand the initial reasons behind the creation of the Turkish-Israeli alliance, one must also recognize why that alignment came to an end. The cause was not within the partnership itself nor was it due to the 2008/2009 Gaza War or the 2010 flotilla events; rather this resulted from … [Read more...]

As the Syrian revolution against Bashar al-Asad’s rule enters its first year, Asad appears to have a good command over Syria’s large and fractious minority community. Three of the most prominent minority groups include the Christians, Druze, and Kurds. Asad’s control of these groups was not happenstance but the result of a number of hard- and soft-power moves executed by the regime. These calculations did not simply involve direct internal dealings with said minorities, but also outreach … [Read more...]

Since the early 1990s, Turkey and Russia's strategic outlooks have gradually been converging. The two countries have incrementally shed their mutual apprehensions and started a comprehensive and multifaceted cooperation. Turkish–Russian interaction in the Middle East, Caucasus, and Mediterranean reveals that there might be limits to the future expansion of their partnership. Russo-Turkish relations encompass a multi-regional agenda from the Balkans to Central Asia, including the … [Read more...]

This article uses a historical approach to identify the reasons Pakistan has turned to Islam as a means to deal with its security dilemma. It then examines the role of education especially that which is oriented toward Islam, in alleviating and/or exacerbating Pakistan’s sense of insecurity. In 1984, while reflecting on Pakistan’s political history, Lawrence Ziring, a leading scholar on South Asia, noted how the country had changed from an Islamic Republic to an … [Read more...]

This article traces the emergence of the modern national identities of Azerbaijanis and Armenians back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it emphasizes the ways national identities were shaped by Azerbaijani and Armenian intellectual elites, reflecting their historical heritage of being parts of Turkish, Persian, and Russian empires. Accordingly, the evolution of mutual perceptions of Azerbaijanis and Armenians vis-à-vis their imperial neighbors--and vice versa--is … [Read more...]

Suppose you read in the Washington Post about a democratic politician who was a refugee from persecution by a dictatorship. Would you be surprised to learn that he was in fact a vicious antisemite, a radical Islamist, and—by the way—a wanted war criminal for his collaboration with the Nazis?

In fact, all of the facts about this politician are easily available in the public record. The man in question is Maarouf al-Dawalibi, whose son, Nofal, has now declared himself leader of a Syrian “government in exile.” I don't want to be unfair to the Washington Post, which in this case merely reports what someone told it and had no reason to research this specific point.

Still, this story amply illustrates the daily misrepresentation and apologies for revolutionary Islamism so common in the media, academia, and among Western government officials. It also shows how a naive West is repeatedly duped and how knowledge of Middle East is so shallow among the supposed experts and pundits.

“[Nofal] al-Dawalibi said his father, Maarouf, was the `last freely elected prime minister’ in Syria, in 1961, but was later jailed and fled to Saudi Arabia two years later, where he became an adviser to the royal family.”

So who was Maarouf? According to official German documents and U.S. Army war crimes’ investigators, he was a Nazi agent stationed in Paris, working for the grand mufti, Amin al-Husaini, and on Berlin’s payroll during World War Two. A secret U.S. intelligence document of June 17, 1945, puts Maarouf al-Dawalibi on the wanted list of war criminals. Somehow he eluded capture.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

A great controversy has erupted over a National Journal article by Michael Hirsh entitled, "The Post Al Qaida Era." I think this is an important issue there is absolutely nothing new here that couldn’t have been seen—as I’ll show in a moment—five years ago.

The Obama Administration has long thought along the following lines:

Al-Qaida is an evil and terrible organization. It attacked America on September 11, 2001. It is a sworn enemy of the United States and it uses terrorism. Consequently, to protect the American homeland, al-Qaida must be destroyed. Our “war on terror” is then a war on al-Qaida.

Oh, yes, one more thing:

Al-Qaida is the only enemy and the only threat. So once al-Qaida is destroyed there is no more problem, no more conflict.

In this context, then, all other revolutionary Islamist groups—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, Hamas, and so on—are not enemies. They can be won over or at least neutralized as threats to U.S. interests. And perhaps even they can become allies because they also oppose al-Qaida or, as they are now called, really radical Salafist groups.

So when the administration now says the “war on terror” is over because al-Qaida has been defeated, it is speaking with total consistency....

"`The war on terror is over,’" one senior State Department official who works on Mideast issues told me. Now that we have killed most of al Qaida, now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.’"

Yes, the war on terror is over but now it is the struggle against revolutionary Islamism that should begin. But it isn’t. Instead the phrase is “legitimate Islamism,” meaning in effect, good anti-American, antisemitic, totalitarianism.

And yet there is even more that’s nonsense here. Very few people ever went to join al-Qaida! We are talking about at most a few thousand in the whole world. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hizballah recruited tens of thousands in each country.

Of course, those radicals would be damn fools not to realize that it makes more sense to join groups that have taken power in Egypt, the Gaza Strip, Tunisia, and Turkey than guys hanging out in caves. Who are the effective revolutionaries?

As we set out down Ibn Gvirol Street to the Herzliya Gymnasia high school, all the stores were closing. The police cordoned off the street to vehicles and, as on Yom Kippur, hundreds of people strolled down the middle of the pavement. Past the city hall, where a concert was starting up, we walked and then past the small memorial of restless stones that marks the place where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

That night in November 1995, I’d come home from the peace rally that had turned into a mass of mourners when the news spread that Rabin had been murdered a few meters away. I walked, crying, into the small room, then a family room and now our office where I’m writing this. Our daughter sat on my wife’s lap.

Now our daughter is 17 years old, playing a leading role in her school’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day commemoration program. In the school’s courtyard, plastic chairs have been set down tightly, arm to arm, for about 1000 people. All of them are full. The front two rows are reserved for the school’s graduates who now are in the army and the parents of those former students who have fallen.

At precisely 8:00 PM, with an un-Israeli sense of discipline, everyone rose at the same moment as the sirens went off. Those are the same sirens as the ones I heard signaling incoming Iraqi missiles almost a quarter-century earlier. A flag is slowly lowered to half-mast. The father of one slain soldier-graduate says the Kaddish; a cantor chants the El Maleh Rahamim prayer, modified for the occasion but rooted in the prayer for those martyred a thousand years ago in Europe by the pogroms accompanying the Crusades.

These are the parts of the program repeated every year. It is possible that such things would grow stale and routine. But they don’t. They are simply—literally—too close to home; too fresh in the mind and raw in the emotions. For all of those students will have to serve, too. And every citizen—not just every soldier—is a potential target.

Yet it is what comes next that is most harrowing. Four students, including our daughter, recite—as photos and details flash on two large screens—the names of each of those martyrs and heroes. One by one they march before us. And the list goes and photos go on and on, for longer than I had expected.

The first of the dead is from 1915; the overwhelming majority, it seems, are from the War of Independence, when about one percent of the Jewish population died. A number of them died on October 6, 1973 and in the following couple of days, in the Sinai at the start of the Yom Kippur war.

Some were civilians; others soldiers. Most male; a few female. Only one is well known, the writer Yosef Hayim Brenner who taught at the school, murdered by an Arab mob in 1921.

At the very end are the names of five people who were killed in the 1948 war, given a special emphasis as they had each been the last survivor of a family wiped out in the Holocaust.

They are frozen with the haircuts and clothes of their time, mostly smiling, happy students or young soldiers. Loved by their family and friends, they were regular people, never intending to be martyrs and certainly not heroes. They were deprived of life but we were deprived of their presence and their achievements.

And suddenly I remembered something I hadn’t thought about for years. A dignified professor told me long ago about a conversation he had once had, probably in the 1960s, with a cabinet minister who had been one of the pillars of the governments of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father.

The powerful politician began talking about the Holocaust and how, deep down, he could not really believe that all of those people had died. For many years, he believed, they were somewhere out there and one day there would magically appear off the coast a vast fleet of ships. They would land amidst rejoicing at the reunions that would take place.

He had to believe that, he continued, for without such an expectation, without all of those people and their talents how could anyone believe that the Israel could be founded and survive and prosper at all? How would it be possible that a people so wounded, so bereft, could survive and be fruitful at all?

And as he originally told this story, the political leader had become deeply emotional and moved. And as the professor recounted the story to me, he had become deeply emotional and moved. And as I heard the story I, too, had become deeply emotional and moved.

“Then He said unto me: 'Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say: Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.”

Now, I watched as these many more people did briefly seem to walk before me.

“So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet….”

And I had only to look around me to know that they had not—a cliché but here a truth—died in vain.

“Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, whither they are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land; and I will make them one nation in the land.”

But I have not invited you to read these words this day just to say this. There is something equally or even more remarkable to tell.

In all of this and throughout the nation on this day, there was not a word of hatred, of reviling any enemy. No smugness of triumph, no desire for conquest; no thirst for revenge or punishment. Thus behaves the world’s most slandered nation.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

In the tiny town of Barr, France—population 6000—in Alsace near the German and Swiss borders, there is a tiny parking lot near the main street. You pull into it, take one of the dozen or so spaces, and then notice the sign, “Parking de Synagogue.”

For a moment one thinks that this is the parking lot of a synagogue. But then you see the small sign saying that in 1882 a synagogue was built on this spot and in 1985 it was torn down to make the parking lot. It isn’t the parking lot for the synagogue but the Synagogue Parking Lot, the only one in town.

The next village down the road, Bergheim, population 1500, is far tinier and even more charming, about the closest thing to a perfectly preserved Medieval place I've ever seen. There, too, is a sign where a synagogue once stood. In both places, I visited the well-organized tourist information bureaus but they could find no picture of the synagogue and knew nothing of their village’s Jewish history....

These communities disappeared and we are now seeing a new version of this story being enacted due to the physical and psychological insecurity of the remaining Jewish community, now focused in France’s big cities.

On the streets of the larger towns in eastern France, there were the small placards for selling magazines which featured a photo of a little girl with the headline, “The girl who made all of France cry,” one of the children murdered by an Islamist terrorist in Toulouse a few days earlier.

Yet the media in France and internationally largely spun the Toulouse story as the tale of troubled young man, perhaps himself a victim, despite the fact that the French police arrested 20 other psalmists, the killer trained at a camp in Afghanistan, his father was a member of an Islamist terror cell in Toulouse, his brother was a known and possibly violent extremist, and the killer who was unemployed had access to a fund of 20,000 Euros.

So the killings allegedly made France cry, but did they make France think?